Google will shut down Dropcam and Nest Secure in 2024

Google has announced, yet again, that they are killing off products. Earlier this month, Google announced that Nest Secure, and the old Dropcam devices will stop working altogether.

Dropcam cameras have been around and working for a very long time, so to some degree I don’t think this is a huge deal. You can’t realistically support cloud based hardware forever, though I also understand that some people will be frustrated by this. It’s frustrating when you have fully functional hardware and it just stops working at some point because the company behind it stops supporting it. You can’t help but feel like it’s a little bit of a bait and switch, even though the reality is that it’s not possible or reasonable to support something like that indefinitely.

While I wish I was surprised by the Nest Secure being killed off too, the writing was on the wall when they discontinued it fairly abruptly shortly after selling it.

The Nest Secure is a great product. It looks really nice and works really well. When it launched it had even better functionality too. It integrates really well with the other Nest products, has a built in battery so that it can function for some time even if the power goes out, and initially had a cellular connection that could be used to alert authorities even if the internet was out. There was a small subscription fee to keep the cellular working but otherwise this all worked without a subscription.

On top of the built in Nest controls, I also have a Starling Home hub (which I highly recommend if you have Google home or Nest products and you’re an Apple house), which let me automate certain functions using Apple’s Shortcuts. For instance, every night at a certain time, the alarm arms itself, then in the morning it disarms itself shortly before we all wake up. It also disarms the alarm automatically when you put in the code on the front door lock. It’s all very handy and has worked extremely well.

Around the same time, Google announced that they are essentially killing off support for 3rd party smart displays. There have been some pretty good ones over the years, and I was close to getting one a couple of times.

Google cuts off third-party smart displays as Assistant support dwindles

Its honestly a joke how often Google wildly shifts directions and kills off products, often ones that are very popular. None of these announcements are terribly surprising unfortunately, and they probably make financial sense for Google, but this just continues to feed the legitimate concerns about relying on Google for anything, particularly if it’s important.

I really like a lot of what Google does. They are honestly the world leader in web based applications and services, and obviously Chrome is enormously successful. But how many times do customers need to be burned by Google before they don’t take them seriously as an option? I’m coming from the standpoint of being a big fan of most of what they do, but honestly at this point I am hesitant to invest more in to the ecosystem. I invested in Nest because I genuinely think they did (and still do for the most part) a better job than their competitors. But when the life of the product is so wildly unpredictable, it is extremely frustrating.

I think this is a serious problem for Google, but I’m not sure how they are ever going to change. It’s a culture issue at this point, but honestly I think it is costing them probably billions of dollars on lost opportunities because they can’t be relied on. It’s not about the specific products, it’s about trust in the brand, and that’s going to be extremely difficult to regain.